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Toward Copyleft Equality for All

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Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#21

Post by tptacek »

vorpalhex wrote: post #19
tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

> But CLAs aren't coercive CLAs are frequently coercive, rights depriving and generally a bad move, and I as a FOSS contributor won't sign them. Yes, occasionally they are used correctly - but more often than not they're used to crowdsource work on what is really a proprietary codebase with crazy potential restrictions if the owning company decides to call them in.

I want to be clear that I think CLAs can be a bad idea for contributors and people should think carefully before signing them. But since the AGPL doesn't obligate you to sign a CLA, I don't see how the existence of CLAs is an indictment of the AGPL or of dual-licensed business models. It's my belief that most dual-licensed software wouldn't be open sourced at all (and a lot of it wouldn't exist at all) without the dual-license model that Kuhn opposes.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#22

Post by int_19h »

tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

If this story is true, it definitely sounds shady to me:

"This problem became clear to me in mid-2003 when MySQL AB attempted to hire me as a consultant. I was financially in need of supplementary income so I seriously considered taking the work, but the initial conference call felt surreal and convinced me that MySQL AB was engaging in problematic behavior . Specifically, their goal was to develop scare tactics regarding the GPLv2."

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#23

Post by bhickey »

Tyr42 wrote: post #12
tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

If you wish for a dissenting opinion on the MongoDB, I enjoy the writing of Kyle Mitchel at /dev/lawyer https://writing.kemitchell.com/series/SSPL.html Kyle is a advocate of dual licensing ("selling exceptions") and has even created License Zero [1] which is attempting to allow the creation of npm libraries which are dual licensed and an automatic command line tool to pay developers. [1]: https://licensezero.com/ see…

Except Kyle misleadingly calls his licenses open source when they aren't. Prosperity discriminates between commercial and non-commercial organizations rather than on how the code is used. He should stop muddying the waters.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#24

Post by PeterZaitsev »

int_19h wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

If this story is true, it definitely sounds shady to me: "This problem became clear to me in mid-2003 when MySQL AB attempted to hire me as a consultant. I was financially in need of supplementary income so I seriously considered taking the work, but the initial conference call felt surreal and convinced me that MySQL AB was engaging in problematic behavior . Specifically, their goal was to develop scare tactics rega…

I think this refers to the attempt of MySQL AB to invent "internal distribution" so where if you have proprietary software which you might be distributing from one department to another in the same company you can't do that with GPL2 and need to buy the proprietary version

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#25

Post by kemitchell »

bhickey wrote: post #23
Tyr42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wish for a dissenting opinion on the MongoDB, I enjoy the writing of Kyle Mitchel at /dev/lawyer https://writing.kemitchell.com/series/SSPL.html Kyle is a advocate of dual licensing ("selling exceptions") and has even created License Zero [1] which is attempting to allow the creation of npm libraries which are dual licensed and an automatic command line tool to pay developers. [1]: https://licensezero.com/ see…

Except Kyle misleadingly calls his licenses open source when they aren't. Prosperity discriminates between commercial and non-commercial organizations rather than on how the code is used. He should stop muddying the waters.

I've never called Prosperity, the noncommercial license, open source. I've called Parity open source.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#26

Post by dredmorbius »

kazinator wrote: post #18
dredmorbius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Affero license gives you precisely the rights to the code . No, it doesn't give you rights to the server the code runs on, but you can spin up your own server (often little more than a RaPi box, possibly more at scale), avoiding lock-in based on software alone. But it obliges you to provide or make available those changes if the use will "propogate" the work. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

If I spin my own server, why would I care what anyone else has done with their server, code-wise? Does everyone in the world who has publicly installed that server owe me a copy of their source code, even if what I run and use is strictly my own server built from the upstream code? By the way, the AGPL3 definition of "propagate" looks exactly the same as that of the the regular GPL3. Operating software as a server do…

If you're competing with a service, it means that you're not going to suffer disadvantage based on the coding / development capabilities of your competitor. What they produce is going to be something that's available to your own deployment.

For self-service, this means that you're not locked out of the development capabilities of the service you've left -- though that arguably creates a free-rider problem for that service.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#27

Post by fourthark »

kazinator wrote: post #7

> The essence in non-legalese is this: If you offer a license that isn't a copyleft license, the copyleft provisions collapse and the software is now available to all under a non-copyleft, hyper-permissive FOSS license. Why would anyone choose this? It must be for the sake of giving the downstream users some sort of assurance that a Bad Thing won't happen to them, as a sort of promise. "If we ever commercialize this,…

I am guessing that now the software can’t be included in something else that uses “predatory copyleft“.

And those derivative works do not have the option to use a less restrictive license that allows such behavior.

Not sure of this though.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#28

Post by singron »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #24
int_19h wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this story is true, it definitely sounds shady to me: "This problem became clear to me in mid-2003 when MySQL AB attempted to hire me as a consultant. I was financially in need of supplementary income so I seriously considered taking the work, but the initial conference call felt surreal and convinced me that MySQL AB was engaging in problematic behavior . Specifically, their goal was to develop scare tactics rega…

I think this refers to the attempt of MySQL AB to invent "internal distribution" so where if you have proprietary software which you might be distributing from one department to another in the same company you can't do that with GPL2 and need to buy the proprietary version

I always wondered if an employee could make a GPL source request to their employer. Is there any more reading about any of these events or legal theory? I'm having difficulty Googling this.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#29

Post by singron »

zeveb wrote: post #10

I believe that this is arguing from a false premise: the reason that companies despise the AGPL is not, I think, that they fear that they fear accidentally violating copyleft and thus being forced to buy a proprietary license but rather than they simply want to have their cake and eat it too: copyleft for thee but not for me. They want to use software for free but not grant the rights they received to their own users…

In my experience, the copyleft provisions of the AGPL are misunderstood by just about everyone to be much more viral than they really are. E.g. "if there is some AGPL software on a workstation or server, we might have to release all source code in the company!"

I wouldn't be surprised if MongoDB has been spreading FUD for years to cause this.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#30

Post by munk-a »

singron wrote: post #29
zeveb wrote: post #10

I believe that this is arguing from a false premise: the reason that companies despise the AGPL is not, I think, that they fear that they fear accidentally violating copyleft and thus being forced to buy a proprietary license but rather than they simply want to have their cake and eat it too: copyleft for thee but not for me. They want to use software for free but not grant the rights they received to their own users…

In my experience, the copyleft provisions of the AGPL are misunderstood by just about everyone to be much more viral than they really are. E.g. "if there is some AGPL software on a workstation or server, we might have to release all source code in the company!" I wouldn't be surprised if MongoDB has been spreading FUD for years to cause this.

I agree with this, AGPL is aimed to be comprehensible in its permissiveness, but most folks don't know AGPL from GPL and, even with AGPL, there are ways to have infectious copy-left licensing if the raw binaries are directly linked into an application.
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